But I’m also in love with this great idea from featherproof books:

It is our most whiz-bangy thing-a-ma-jig yet. The TripleQuick Fiction iPhone app.

What’s that you ask? Well, simply put: stories by some of today’s most exciting young writers delivered straight to your iPhone or IPod touch. With the TripleQuick Fiction app you can download new stories in seconds and read them on the go, wherever you are.

And we’re not calling it TripleQuick just cause we like how it rolls off the tongue. These short shorts are only 333 words long. That’s just 3 iPhone screens. You can read one in 3 minutes or less. They were all written with the mobile attention span in mind.

And the app is there, just a buck ninety-nine.

Anyone tried it?

It took the young man literally less than three minutes after taking my password to say, “I can see your website dashboard just fine,” which of course made me want to tear my hair out.

“HOW can you see it if I can’t?”

“Well,” he asked, calm as a pumpkin, “what browser are you using?”

Are you kidding me?  BROWSER?  It’s not my browser!  It’s Word Press. Or so I thunk.  But I did as he asked and downloaded Firefox.

Guess what?  I can see my blog just peachy keen in Firefox.  And Chrome.  And Safari. But not in Internet Explorer.

“WHY?” I asked.  “What happened?  And why aren’t forty million other Word Press users who use IE freaking out like I was?”

“I don’t know.”  That seemed to satisfy him.

This strikes me as infinitely wacky.  Is that just because I’m over 40 and simply too old to accept the quirky jitters of computers?  I did my own computer programming training on punch cards, I admit.  It was a time when If/Then statements always made sense.  When 1+1=2 all the time, every time.  And if something went wrong with a computer, well, it was for some sort of reason.  It might take twenty solid hours to figure out that reason, but a reason existed.  Programs were a thing of beauty.  They fit.  They worked.  They made sense.

And of course my problem–and it is a life problem, some would say–is that I want to know why.  It’s asking “why” about the stuff of life that drives me to write.  It drives a lot of my life decisions.  My young techno-helper’s peace with his “I don’t know” stopped me short.

Dude, I thought, I wanna be like you.

So I’ve learned a lesson.  I won’t ever again spend a week trying to figure technological things out on my own.  I’m  a novelist, not a computer whiz.  And I’ll call for help earlier.  And keep that hosting service, God love ‘em.  They know the meaning of customer service, even for a middle aged broad like me!

I’d rather be working on my next novel!

I’m feeling a little guilty about sounding like a whiner. Oh, to heck with it, I AM whining. I know it. This sort of technology frustration deserves a good whine. I promise no more whining after this.

These are things my protagonist Lonnie Squires faces constantly–the fear of having her life go all to hell if she outs herself. The belief as she looks around her that even if she did come out, she’d be the only one. A serious lack of community.

Maybe Lonnie needs to get a facebook account. That could provide plenty of scary stuff for an upcoming book! What would I call it? Faced. Booked. Networked to Death.

Anybody have any ideas about why homosexuals use social networks so much more than straight folks?

And in a few minutes I have a phone meeting with my new editor at Bella–so far so good on the production process for the next Lonnie Squires mystery, TOASTED.

It’s a good Tuesday.